Soyuz
SWAB Barcelona 2019

The exhibition project of this booth revolves around the dynamics of perception of the individual and of the relations with the other. In a present that imposes to often renegotiate the terms of one’s own private space, the fulfilment experience can’t do anything but redefine the perimeter of its own intimacy. The very concept of identity extends its boundaries towards new gratification conditions, being stuck in the opposition between singularity and multiplicity, pleasure and deprivation, private and shared.
The booth opens to a dialogue between the works of young Belgian artist Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx and a work of the controversial Swiss artist Urs Lüthi, with a modality that rethinks some aspects of one of the latest exhibitions presented at Soyuz, “Unders”. In doing so, the project aims to present to the fair also one of the exhibition concepts that underlie the research carried out by Soyuz - to set-up courses that allow young artists to measure themselves against established ones, in new ways and helping provide further interpretations of the present.
The project includes a series of middle-sized ceramic sculptures by Benny Van den Meulengracht-Vrancx, put on the floor. His sculptures are ever-changing polymorphous entities, stretching between what they are and what they aim to become. The work explores the process of relations with the other and the reactions thus generated, hanging in the balance between two opposites - an approach that sometimes searches for the close encounter through the act of “looking” and other times shuns it through the act of concealing, hiding behind a mask. The same could be said for the work of Lüthi, but in a slightly different way: his self-portrait is, as a matter of fact, part of a work that guides us towards the awareness of a duality that is both vanitas and disguise, a tension that scatters any absolute certainties of identity.